User Research Planning and Facilitation - UX/UI Design
My Work Included
- UX/UI Design
- User Research Planning
- User Recruitment
- Test Session Moderation
- Feedback Compiling and Presentation
My Client
Optum
Project Timeline
August 2019 to February 2020
At Optum, I planned and facilitated quarterly user interviews sessions based on UI/UX design changes for an internal developer website.
Going into 2020, I was eager to expand my skills into other user research methods, including conducting focus groups, A/B and beta testing in improving Optum Developer.
In August 2019, I was brought onto the Optum Developer team to help plan and facilitate quarterly user research plans.
Optum Developer is a site primarily used by developers, regardless of experience level or expertise.
It’s a site used for discussion and discovery of how code, trends and projects can be customized for user projects.
Starting in late 2018 and into 2019, more visitor traffic was pulled away towards Optum Tech’s Hub (a sister site made for housing all of the code needed for developer projects), which had recently went through their own online transformation.
Our team’s goal in Fall/Winter 2019 was to see how people used Optum Developer and figure out how to update the website to fit in better with the overall brand of internal sites and increase user engagement.
Working with my supervisor and colleague, our team of 3 worked on planning and facilitating user testing sessions as well as gathering and compiling feedback into reports and modifying UI elements.
Our designs for new Optum Developer pages leaned towards simplifying the home page and have it feature specific topics, sites, news, events and other assets available to Optum Developers.
Search and Index pages were also cleaned up to provide easier access to discussion and developer topics that would help solve critical issues and problems developers would face while working on tight deadlines.
Optum Developer Home
1. Heading and Search. We highlighted a recent redesign of the Optum Developer logo along with simplifying and placing the search bar on top of the page.
2. Streamlined Navigation. Our team carried out IA (Information Architecture) work on the existing Optum Developer site to better condense and organize pages for visitors.
3. Dynamic Homepage. We cleaned up our previous site (containing a lot of topic icons) with modals that would feature changing content and offer the latest news and events for engineers.
Optum Developer Search
1. New Sort Options. The Relevance and Newest toggle allows for developers to better look for content they need.
2. Posting Dates. Dates for when posts, events and other terms help let engineers know how new or old their search content is.
3. Search Results Filter. Our design included Filters to help narrow down search results by Sites (always featured on top of results list), Posts, News and Events.
4. Filter Labeling. In addition to the Filter on the left, we designed each search result to be labeled and color coded according to its content type (Site, Post, News, Events).
Optum Developer Index
1. Developer-Designed Index. Our team switched an older, alphabetical index for one that reflected the design lifecycle.
2. Developer Lifecycle Sub-Topics. As part of our IA work for Optum Developer, we grouped Index topics by development lifecycle stages to better help developers in using the Index page.
3. Alphabetical Topic Lists. Our main Index page still maintained an alphabetical list of topics so engineers can better seek out what information they need.
In November 2019, we scheduled 8 user testing sessions using Optum’s state-of-the-art usability lab, for 45 minutes each.
The tests had two parts: general questions on how Optum Developer is used and feedback on Optum Developer mockups (above).
General Optum Developer Usage Questions included:
- When do you visit Optum Developer when working?
- What topics do you look for when visiting Optum Developer? To you, what’s missing?
- What features on Optum Developer are there that you find helpful? Unhelpful? Unnecessary?
- What other sites do you go to to get the information you need (Google, Stack Overflow, etc) What features on those sites would you like to see included on Optum Developer?
General Optum Developer Mockup Questions included:
- What are your impressions of this page (homepage, search page, index)?
- Do you find this layout helpful/unhelpful when looking for information?
- What changes to this layout would you make (if any)?
Plans for testing into 2020 included steering away from week long, multiple 45 minute interview sessions and on planning a focus group to workshop solutions and get opinions from developers and engineers in a dynamic setting.
Questions for future focus groups included:
- What are your impressions of this page? Is this design helpful/unhelpful in accessing information you need?
- Do you know what this site’s intentions are?
- TASK: Say you had to look for information on Jenkins using Optum Developer. How could you look for more information on Jenkins?
The focus group for the first quarter of 2020 didn’t materialize due to only a few developers/engineers responding to email requests to join the focus group for Mid-March 2020.
We had laid out a Beta Test Plan for the second quarter for 2020, starting in April 2020.
The general plan was to reach out to users across all experience/expertise levels and genders so there’s a pool of...
- 33% of developers and engineers with 1-3 years of experience
- 33% of developers and engineers with 3-6 years of experience
- 33% of developers and engineers with 6+ years of experience
- 50% of feedback respondents identifying as male
- 50% of feedback respondents identifying as female
"We adore you. And your work"
- Feedback from my manager, Jamie, and supervisor Andy